You probably know already that using obvious or easy-to-discover passwords like "password" or your pet's name is a bad idea. But how can you make your passwords significantly more secure?

First, you need to use a different long, strong password for each account. Hackers often attempt to break into accounts by employing a "dictionary attack," which involves using words straight from the dictionary to guess your password. So don't use standard words as your passwords; instead, try creating them from a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols. And don't simply replace letters in a word with a symbol (for example, using the @ symbol in place of an A); it's too common a trick. You can also strengthen your passwords by using a mix of lowercase and capital letters.

Regular Backups

Data defeat can wreak havoc on anyone's life, especially for business owners, this will keep sounding particularly true. Because losing data is of the like kind a common occurrence, and one for the most part impossible to protect yourself from in quite circumstances, certain precautions must be taken in conduct to keep the information on your computers to the degree that safe as possible. By backing up your plan regularly, you are giving yourself and your employment the best possible chance of going forward uninterrupted by a frustrating data waste occurrence. It may feel unnecessary whether or not you have not yet experienced like an unfortunate accident, but consider to what extent much critical information is kept in your computers. What would befall if it were all lost? Unless the answer to this controversy is something other than catastrophic amounts of detriment, be smart and keep your system backed up.

Desktop Locking Policy

You turn your attention away from your computer - you should lock your desktop. It is not just about level of trust you put in the people that you think may indeed gain physical access to your system. You may think that you have nothing of importance on your desktop or to lose by leaving your system unlocked and unattended, but the last thing you would want is unwanted events occuring in 'your name'.

If your computer forms part of a domain in a business it is also good policy to enforce desktop locking automatically with the use of a Group Policy.

Managed Services

More often than not you may find that you leave your systems hanging on the edge until they give up, and as an critical resource, no longer available to you.

Having a Managed Services policy in place allows for your critical systems to be monitored in realtime and steps can then be taken to resolve any issues before they disable your systems, therefore enforcing them to become unproductive and subsequently hitting your budget until the problems are resolved.

None of us revel in the delight of waiting for a device to fail, if and when it happens it becomes inconvenient and frustrating. In business it can become a very costly and sometimes catrastrophic excercise and one that shouldn't need to present itself. Devices do fail but pre-emptimg their failure can go along way to minimising downtime.

USB Keys - Not for storage!

USB Keys/Pen Drives have become an affordable way of holding Data. It is all to common for us to start using them as a sole means of storing data. There are a number of risks associated with this and these are: USB device failure, loss of the device, theft of the device, theft from the device if left lying around. The other consideration with storing all of your data on USB Keys as your solestorage medium is that it is unlikely backed up. If any of the above circumstances befit your USB Key it is likely that your data will be gone forever! In practice, USB Keys are great for transferring large amounts of data from one location to another but as a sole storage medium, it is a risky business.